Chris Chester’s Reviews > Corporations Are Not People: Reclaiming Democracy from Big Money and Global Corporations > Status Update

Corporations can have no virtue, because they are just tools. Unless specifically designed to do otherwise, they will circumvent the law and public good if it satisfies their underlying goal.

Their strengths are privileges that should be able to be revoked, not rights of the sort accorded to people.

Not a question of more or less regulation. Sometimes regulation is good (as when controlling the derivatives market. Sometimes it's bed (as when preventing negotiation with Big Pharma). Important thing is corporations externalizing costs: individual libertarian is fine.

Corporations are the largest donors, and their money gets them legislation that essentially hands them money, increasing national debt.

Corporations are only metaphorical persons, created as instruments of governments... or the Delaware government, anyway. Therefor, except where it benefits the public good, they should not be granted the rights of actual persons.

Let me remind you all the ways corporations suck: they block legislation banning smoking and advertising cigarettes to kids; they refuse to label their shitty food; they hijack the process of education; they steal money through for-profit schools.

I don't appreciate that he's trotting out the puppy dogs and kittens of corporate victims, but I take the larger point.

Clements pegs the birth of the corporatist legal movement on Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell.